Mat Johnson - Drop

Landing ended, I rose from my hole, my clothes raining dust. In West Philly, life kept moving. As I stood between them, men drove cars both ways down the road. Nobody even honked at me, not even glancing in their rearview mirrors as they sped by. On the pavement, old ladies still walked slow and scared, hobbling from one leg to the other like windup soldiers with gray wigs on, pacing a triangle between the supermarket, the check-cashing place, and home. Drug dealers still sat on corners, waiting for their business to come to them. Nobody to notice me but the rats who paused from their hunt to stand on hind legs and bob their noses in my direction, the cockroaches and the yam-skinned man. Smiling at me from the curb as I stood in the traffic wanting to climb back into the hole I had made there.

How long had he been waiting? Sitting with his ass stuck in the metal mesh of a garbage can, his legs hanging over the edge and kicking loosely like a child in a shopping cart. How long had he been waiting, staring skyward, hoping for the streak in the sky that would be me, tumbling down, back into his jurisdiction? Oh, and wasn’t he laughing now? You never heard a joke that funny, the way he was carrying on. Whiplashing his head as he filled the street with his joy. I could smell the rot of his breath between the passing cars. A smile of randomly missing teeth made even more horrific by the fact that his face was actually handsome, that beauty could be wasted on an existence like his. Pointing at me, the fallen, with both dirty hands. Ha-ha, ha-ha, Philly boy come home. He would feed for weeks on this moment, smiling at me from his putrid garbage throne. Letting his cackles bark me down the road and blocks beyond, keeping rhythm even as I banged on Alex’s door. Silencing only after I collapsed into her unexpecting arms and lost awareness there.

‘So what the hell happened?’ Alex asked me the next morning. I’d woken up to the sounds of her getting dressed, of cabinets being opened and closed. Her apartment was so small she’d banged the couch nearly as many times as she passed it.

‘It broke.’ The couch was narrow, too, and not long. My feet had been hanging over the edge the whole night and now they were bloodless and numb.

‘I didn’t even get my chance to visit. Was it any good?’ Alex’s hair was a bit shorter, her banana peel skin almost brown. It was October, but the summer clung to her flesh as always, giving her a moment of negritude before returning her to her octoroon pale.

‘No, it was perfect. It was absolutely perfect,’ I told her.

‘Then why are you here? Why didn’t it last?’

‘Shit, it was better than this place.’

‘ “Philadelphia Freedom”,’ a women with a voice that cursed learns to sing lightly. ‘“I luv-uv-uv-you. Yes, I do!” ’ Alex screeched.

‘I should smother you. Nobody knows I’m home. You ain’t got no windows, monkey-love. I could get away with it.’ Alex hit me on the head and walked into the bathroom, leaving the door open as she stared at herself. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘To work. To earn some money.’

‘You have a shoot?’

‘No. I got a part-time job.’

‘What, you prop styling? You doing some assisting for another photographer?’

‘Green’s Nursing Home. The one up Germantown, on Schoolhouse.’ Alex rolled her eyes when I let out a sigh.

‘You got a gift,’ I reminded her.

‘Don’t start bugging; I know what I got. I got bills. I can’t eat off photos right now, so that’s just the way it is. It’s not that bad. Some of the residents are cool. They have good stories. So, what’s your plan, Chris? You’re home.’

‘I get my shit together. I get out.’

‘So, you’re going to look for an ad gig. The Sunday paper’s in the trash at the bottom. Don’t make a mess pulling it out.’

‘I’m not getting into advertising around here. Two, three months tops, then I’m gone. I don’t exist here any more.’

‘So, you going to try to poke around and get some freelance work? I’ll look out for you, see what pops up. I know about one gig, should be coming around next six months or so, a buddy from Temple’s working at the Philly tourist board. They got grants, I know they’re going to be looking for stuff.’

Pumping up Philly to the ignorant. Not going to happen.

Alex’s apartment only had one room, and she barely fit in that one. She couldn’t manage me there and I knew she shouldn’t. Momentum I was having, I might rip a hole through her floor and drag her down with me. So I started making calls. The first agency I contacted let me see their place that afternoon. The listing said: Sunny studio, 275 +. Cheap enough that I could take it and still pay off the lease when I was done. It was only a few blocks away. I met the landlord in front, a small man with too much hair on his body to be human. His clothes were dirty and so was the apartment; the hallway leading up was dark with grease, the living room windows streaked and crusted. In the kitchen, hollow brown cockroach shells lay on their backs across the counters and floor like beachcombers. ‘I been fumigating, y’know?’ the landlord told me. The place was shaped like a lollipop, the circle being the room and the stem the kitchen with the bathroom at the end. I could hold out my arms and reach from the wall behind the stove to the window on the other side, and did so, and then wiped the black grime from my knuckle. It was a hole I could climb into. The offer of a cash payment meant that by night it was mine.

I walked back from the realty place with a contract in my pocket and keys in my hand. At the bank my pounds were replaced with green play money, all the same size; everything could be obtained with just a few folds from my roll. I passed a yard sale that had a futon; a Penn student gave it to me for thirty bucks and smiled as if she was an humanitarian. Did I look that raggedy? Bobbing and swaying, I thanked her. I didn’t say, I went to college, too. That I was a man once that walked upright, clean shaven. Thirty bucks was a good deal, and she could think what she wanted. Huge as it was, I folded it over my head and I walked back home. It tried to swallow me with every bounce. I saw where I was going by staring at the ground, hating that I knew this place so well that the pavement was all I needed for orientation.

I got as far as Clark Park before I had to lay it down. It sat getting dirty on a public bench as I waited for my strength to return. I noticed the other men sitting around me, a parliament of the powerless.

‘Yo cuz, you hook me up?’

‘Brother, brother’ — shrug, shrug, hand held out — ‘got a little something you can spare?’

‘Give me some money, get some eats, cool?’

‘Yo nig, you want some smoke?’

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘I’m the man. How much you want?’ asked the dealer-bum, eyes skipping from Baltimore to Chester Avenue to see if anyone was coming, sitting down next to my futon on the unbroken end of the park bench. Connecting my thumbs and forefingers before me, I made the largest circle I could with two hands. ‘Like that,’ I told him, trading another green note for a green-filled sandwich bag.

I kept walking home, the futon on my head massive and white as a corpse, up the hill towards 46th and Baltimore, to my new house. Moving guilty, scoping for cops with the limited vision that the mattress offered. Trying to remember what an innocent man walked like so I could imitate him. Outside of my vision, I imagined my succubus Fionna and her parasitic cousins lining the streets and staring my way, laughing and pointing and feeding off my misery as they once did off my hospitality and ignorance.

In the crib, I flopped the futon down, dirt shooting out from underneath it in angry brown gusts. It took up most of the floor. I kicked it against the wall, made enough room to walk around on the kitchen side. It was a bloated carpet: no matter where you stood in the room, if you fell it would be there for you. If my head was stronger, I would have gotten more. Tied them to the walls with cable cord, nailed them to the ceiling and in the bathroom and kitchen, too. I would make a suit of futon, wrap it around my legs, arms and torso, sewing it down with fishing cord. Then I would feel good. I would be safe and happy once more. Outside, gunshot ghosts thundered off in the distance, reminding me again that storms got closer — that’s what they did you see. Eventually the pop-pop would catch up to me.